Paddock Garden
From pasture to potatoes — how we turned a grazed paddock into a structured food garden, using the big gear and no sprays.
08 November 2025
At Waionehu, the Paddock Garden began the way good ideas often do — with an experiment, a bit of curiosity, and a tractor that needed a new purpose.
This wasn’t a bare paddock sprayed out or stripped down. We decided early on to terminate the pasture biologically, using timing, animals, and soil life instead of chemistry. The cows went in first, grazing the pasture hard and low to open up the canopy and kickstart cycling. From there, we followed up with a spring cultivation, just enough to open the surface and let oxygen in.
Two weeks later, we ran the spring tine cultivator again to break up the root mat and start levelling the ground. After that pass, the soil was ready for what it had been waiting for — a generous dose of farm compost blended with activated biochar. This mix reintroduces organic matter, stabilises nutrients, and lays down carbon for the microbial community to build from. A final tine pass five days later settled everything into a warm, even seedbed.
It’s a quiet satisfaction, watching the big gear working differently — not to grow feed, but to grow food.
🥔 Deep-Planted Potatoes, Living Cover
The potatoes will go in next, set deep at around 45 cm using our small tractor and single drill. We won’t be hilling them — instead, we’re trying something a bit different.
Between the rows, a living cover crop of phacelia, plantain, white clover, and chicory will fill the space. These species will help outcompete annual weeds like fathen, hold soil moisture, and keep the surface shaded and cool through the summer.
By the time the potato plants start flowering, that living mulch will be doing double duty — drawing in pollinators and fixing carbon through the roots. It’s all about creating enough competition for the weeds, but not for the crop.
🌱 The Vegetable Strip
Along the fenceline, there’s a 90-metre strip set aside for the vegetable rows — our structured food system within the paddock.
Here, we’ll feed out rank lucerne baleage as mulch — a thick, nutrient-rich blanket that suppresses weeds, feeds worms, and locks in moisture. The vegetable seedlings will be planted straight into that layer.
The layout is simple but purposeful:
🍅 Tomatoes and basil, with marigolds woven between for colour and pest control.
🥦 Broccoli, lettuce, and spring onions, spaced for airflow and ease of harvest.
🥒 Courgettes and nasturtiums, tumbling out over the lucerne mulch.
🌶 Capsicums, parsley, and dill, bringing structure and diversity to the midsection.
🥗 Fast greens and radishes, filling every available space to keep the soil covered.
The lucerne mulch also gives us options. If February turns dry, we can tee into the nearby water line for a simple irrigation system, or even give the plants a light foliar feed with fish fertiliser from the tow-n-fert as it drives past.
This garden is built to be practical — managed with what’s already on hand, but designed with regenerative intent.
🌽 Between the Rows – The Three Sisters
Between the potatoes and the vegetable strip sits our Three Sisters-style planting — corn, pumpkins, and beans. The corn gives structure, the pumpkins spread across the soil as a living mulch, and the beans climb upward to fix nitrogen and tie it all together.
It’s the same principle we’re testing across the farm: let plants do the work that inputs used to do.
🌿 Why It Matters
The Paddock Garden is our structured system — the proof-of-concept for how we can integrate food growing into productive farmland without compromising stock, soil, or time. It’s also a way to reconnect the land to the kitchen, closing loops and feeding people from the same soil that supports our animals.
Everything about this patch is an experiment — the timing, the planting depth, the cover species — but it’s also a statement.
That farming can be productive, beautiful, and nourishing all at once.
No sprays. No bare soil. No single-purpose paddocks. Just living systems layered together, doing what nature already knows how to do — with a bit of help from the big gear.
The Chaoss Garden
It all begins with an idea.
11 November 2025
If the Paddock Garden is all about rhythm, rows, and predictability, then the Chaoss Garden is its mirror image — wild, experimental, and full of life that refuses to fit into a plan.
This patch sits out at the Schutts driveway, where we decided to hand more control back to nature and just see what happens when soil, seed, and biology get to write the recipe themselves.
We’ve called it the Chaoss Garden — a mix of chaos and soil.
🌱 A Living Seed Mix
The ground will be sprayed out with a light rate of glyphosate, fish fertiliser and Fulvic acid (Fulvic acid increases cell wall permeability by 30% reducing the amount of spray required, fish fert keeps the soil biology fed so that they can eat and digest the low rate of glyphosate). This wont be cultivated, just Direct drilled. The residue from the previous season stayed on top as armour, and the diversity went straight in underneath.
The seed blend includes everything from carrots, beetroot, and leeks to peas, broccoli, pak choi, sunflowers, lupins, vetch, yarrow, and marigold — plus a dash of wildflowers to feed the pollinators.
We also treated the vegetable seed with Trichoderma, a beneficial fungus that protects roots from disease and helps the young plants build stronger relationships with soil microbes from day one.
Some plants will thrive, some will struggle, and some will show up in places we never expected. That’s part of the magic.
This garden isn’t about control — it’s about creating conditions for life to organise itself.
🐔 The Chicken Loop
To close the loop, we’ve added a mobile chicken hutch that will eventually move through the Chaoss Garden once the first crops have finished. Inside are fourteen Chickens — a mix of Orpingtons and Sussex, both dual-purpose breeds.
They weren’t hatched here on the farm (our own hatch didn’t work out this time), but they’ve settled in well. We’re not entirely sure yet who’s a hen and who’s a rooster — that part will sort itself out too. Thats the beauty of the duel purpose breed, we will eat any surplus.
By the time the garden is in its peak, they’ll be nearing maturity. The plan is simple: they’ll help tidy up what we don’t harvest, eating the leftovers and turning it into fertility. If the balance swings our way and we end up with enough hens, they’ll start laying right as the garden hits its stride — fresh eggs for the boys to collect and sell.
It’s another layer of life in the system — a cycle of food, fertility, and fun that builds more than it takes.
🌾 Life in Motion
There’s no blueprint here. The Chaoss Garden shifts daily — new seedlings appearing, others fading, bees and butterflies finding their rhythm, and soon, chooks wandering through the mix.
It’s a full ecosystem, not a crop. The plants feed the soil. The soil feeds the microbes. The microbes feed the next flush of growth.
It’s messy, it’s unpredictable, and it’s exactly how it should be.
🌿 What It Teaches Us
The Chaoss Garden is our reminder that regeneration isn’t always about control — sometimes it’s about trust.
Trust that seeds know how to grow.
That roots will find their own balance.
That animals can become part of the solution instead of a problem.
That the land remembers what to do if we give it the chance.
Every day out here looks different, and that’s the point. It’s not a linear system — it’s a living one. And as we keep learning, that’s where the resilience comes from.
Imagine how much extra food we could grow for our whānau and community if every farm using multi-species crops tucked a few edibles into their mix.
A handful of seed, a shift in thinking — and suddenly every paddock becomes part of our local food system.